“The only way the audience could really understand the feeling of the music was by watching his dramatic head tosses and all the body English, all the swooning and writhing and flinging about of wrists,” Stark had reported. “The playing itself had absolutely no feeling, no nuance at all, but most audiences don’t realize they’re not reacting to the actual sound when they’re watching someone like this onstage. I told my students to observe this, to watch for all his ridiculous empty gestures, and they were mightily entertained.”

Her conversation with Ozzie Simon concluded at last, Edwina Whitely thanked him politely and turned her attention to George and Rebecca, a tiny, Stark-like ironic smile playing at her lips. She told George how much Stark had truly admired his work, and George explained that he had been trying to write something celebratory to honor her son’s life, because the unfinished work he had just been playing was too dark and too much about her son’s death. She cried unabashedly when he said this, without even attempting to dab her streaming tears with her napkin. Rebecca understood in a new way that the kindest thing you can do for someone in mourning might just be to witness the tears, simply to accept the person’s grief any way it comes. Sometimes she rushed people out of her office on the grounds of efficiency and consideration for the next patient who was being kept waiting, when she knew it was really because sometimes she simply needed to shut down the flood of grief and misery that punctuated her working days.

When they took her to the train, as she got out of the car, Edwina said something about wanting to send George a personal object of Stark’s, for which he thanked her. Back in Rebecca’s Willow Street apartment, there was nothing more to do or say about Stark Whitely on this day. He was truly gone. George and Rebecca got into their bed and clung together under the quilt, crying, their arms wrapped around each other. They became still at this darkening blue hour, listening to the odd yet comfortingly familiar noise of the upstairs neighbor, Al, a solitary copy editor at the New Haven Register, who seemed to spend his waking hours patrolling the perimeters of his apartment in hard shoes, with pauses only for the mysterious dragging sound that suggested the regular movement of large steamer trunks across bare wooden floors. They dozed briefly, not speaking, and then their embrace segued from a simple and comforting holding to a marvelously charged and erotic connection, with every touch a provocative invitation to touch more purposefully, more teasingly, more daringly. They began to make the particular kind of urgent love ignited by grief.

Moving over her, George looked down into Rebecca’s eyes and saw his own sadness. They rocked together, slowly, with the languid luxury and privilege reserved only for couples who know each other this thoroughly and profoundly.

“Larghissimo,” Rebecca whispered. They moved in a kind of deliberate and inevitable harmony, their two-part invention as new and familiar as always. They came together, and then subsided into a deep doze for a few moments, only to be woken by the upstairs neighbor’s renewed dragging sounds.